From Transition to Innovation: Policy Issues in a Knowledge-based Economy

This paper contains a general vision of the main issues on innovation policies in East European new member countries and candidate countries. It is based both on the data taken from the main European benchmarking studies on innovation perspectives, and on the direct experience of advisors who worked in East European pilot countries (Slovenia). This paper focuses on the problems arising from the encounter of European innovation policies and local culture and governance structures in these countries. This situation shows that the innovation phase, following transition, generally calls for a further tuning of EU innovation policies in these countries. In order to develop effective market spin-offs from innovation policies, greater attention should be given to triggering bottom-up policies at regional level by reducing decision-making centralism; lowering the risk of imitative and trend-oriented policies; supporting the birth of new enterprises besides backing the existing ones; developing mostly software rather than hardware policy components. All of this should fit in a general framework recognising the central role of individuals – and thus of culture, starting from entrepreneurial culture – within a knowledge-based innovation process. The recent Slovenian action plan for innovation is included as an example of a strategic plan able to spotlight these main issues.     

Disconnected Geography: A Spatial Analysis of Disconnected Youth in the United States

Since the Great Recession, US policy and advocacy groups have sought to better understand its effect on a group of especially vulnerable young adults who are not enrolled in school or training programs and not participating in the labor market, so called ‘disconnected youth.’ This article distinguishes between disconnected youth and unemployed youth and examines the spatial clustering of these two groups across counties in the US. The focus is to ascertain whether there are differences in underlying contextual factors among groups of counties that are mutually exclusive and spatially disparate (non-adjacent), comprising two types of spatial clusters – high rates of disconnected youth and high rates of unemployed youth. Using restricted, household-level census data inside the Census Research Data Center (RDC) under special permission by the US Census Bureau, we were able to define these two groups using detailed household questionnaires that are not available to researchers outside the RDC. The geospatial patterns in the two types of clusters suggest that places with high concentrations of disconnected youth are distinctly different in terms of underlying characteristics from places with high concentrations of unemployed youth. These differences include, among other things, arrests for synthetic drug production, enclaves of poor in rural areas, persistent poverty in areas, educational attainment in the populace, children in poverty, persons without health insurance, the social capital index, and elders who receive disability benefits. This article provides some preliminary evidence regarding the social forces underlying the two types of observed geospatial clusters and discusses how they differ.     

Psychologists’ roles in ending homelessness

Homelessness in the U.S. remains a pernicious social problem despite national coordinated efforts to end it. Psychologists are well positioned to address homelessness through direct service, advocacy, research, and policy work. Results of a survey of psychologist members (n?=?197) and student members (n?=?209) of the American Psychological Association highlighted activities they engaged in related to helping people who experience housing instability and showed psychologists are more compassionate toward those who experience homelessness than is the general public. Respondents suggested a number of factors that would encourage their greater involvement with homelessness issues including receiving more focused training, increased funding for services, and simply being asked by someone to help. Given the continued problem of homelessness, psychologists can play an important role in supporting those who are in this situation. Suggestions for increasing training and engagement of psychologists are discussed.     

NORMS OF PUNISHMENT: EXPERIMENTS WITH STUDENTS AND THE GENERAL POPULATION

Norms of cooperation and punishment differ across societies, but also within a single society. In an experiment with two subject pools sharing the same geographical and cultural origins, we show that opportunities for peer punishment increase cooperation among students but not in the general population. In previous studies, punishment magnified the differences across societies in people's ability to cooperate. Here, punishment reversed the order: with punishment, students cooperate more than the general population while they cooperate less without it. (JEL C72, C90, Z13)     

Groupthink and Project Performance: The Influence of Personal Traits and Interpersonal Ties

This study explores whether the negative impact of “groupthink concurrence‐seeking behavior” (GTB) on business process reengineering (BPR) projects is affected by group members personal traits and interpersonal ties within the group. To this purpose we conduct and present the results of a longitudinal controlled field experiment over 18 BPR projects lasting 3 months and involving 18 teams comprising 71 first‐year MBA students. The main contribution of this study is twofold. First, we explicitly consider and measure the core construct of groupthink phenomenon: that is, GTB. Existing organizational behavior literature has, contrarily, considered only its causes, symptoms, and outcomes. Second, we show evidence that GTB does have a negative impact on group performance in BPR project settings. In this regards, results also indicate that while perceived control, conscientiousness and interpersonal evaluation mitigate the negative impact of GTB on group project performance, confidence, and previous relationships amplify this negative impact, even if they have a direct positive effect on performance. Thanks to the findings of this study, we are able to provide valuable suggestions to managers in charge of BPR projects for ensuring effective performance of project teams and controlling for potential obstacles due to GTB.     

Exploring the absolutist vs relativist perception of poverty using a cross-country questionnaire survey

Questionnaires eliciting the absolutist vs relativist perception of poverty are administered to 1941 undergraduate students in eight countries - Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Laos, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We find that the perception of poverty expressed by a large fraction of respondents exhibits both absolutist and relativist concerns, with the former components prevailing over the latter. High-income countries exhibit a significantly more pronounced relativist attitude. Personal characteristics such as past experience of material hardship and relative standard of living play a germane role in shaping respondents’ views.     

TREATMENT OF MARITAL CONFLICT AND PREVENTION OF DIVORCE

This paper provides a review of previous literature reviews on the effectiveness of marital therapy and evaluates the long-term efficacy of couples therapy in preventing marital separation and divorce. There is general agreement that marital therapy can be effective in reducing marital conflict and promoting marital satisfaction, at least in the short term. Research examining the long-term efficacy of couples therapy for the prevention of marital separation and divorce is sparse but promising with respect to its effectiveness in promoting marital stability. Predictors of successful marital therapy outcomes, the clinical significance of marital therapy outcomes, and the cost effectiveness of marital therapy are also discussed.     

The Role of Declarative Pointing in Developing a Theory of Mind

It has been suggested that the child's capacity to represent and influence another person's attentional state about an object or event in triadic interactions (declarative communication) is an early manifestation of social understanding in the second year of life. This study tested the following predictions: First, in typically developing children declarative pointing emerges later than imperative pointing. Second, the capacity to use declarative pointing is linked to the understanding of other's intentions (i.e., to the capacity to reproduce other's intended acts after seeing failed attempts to perform these acts). The study was conducted in 2 phases. In the first phase, the parents of 133 typically developing infants completed the Questionnaire on Pointing Gesture, which allowed the identification of babies able to use pointing in familiar contexts. Of these children, 40 participated in the experiment and were tested on 2 tasks: a new task designed to elicit production and comprehension of imperative and declarative pointing, and a modified version of Meltzoff's (1995) task designed to assess understanding of others' intentions. Tasks were administered to each participant in 2 sessions carried out at 3‐month intervals. Children were 12 months old on average at the 1st session and 15 months old on average at the 2nd session. Results showed that children produced and understood declarative pointing later than imperative pointing. Furthermore, production of declarative pointing was clearly linked to understanding of others' intentions. No relation was found between production and comprehension of imperative pointing and intention understanding. Implications from the association between declarative pointing and inferring other's intentions are discussed.     

Composite Indicator of Social Inclusion for European Countries

Social inclusion is one of the key challenges of the European Union (EU) Sustainable Development Strategy. We use four indicators from EU policies to measure social inclusion for the 27 member countries of Europe. In particular, we aggregate the four indicators in a multiplicative composite indicator via a DEA-BoD approach with weights determined endogenously with proportion constraints. We obtain a score of social inclusion that allows us to grade the 27 EU countries from 2006 to 2010. In this way, we highlight the specific role played by the four indicators in determining improvements and deteriorations of social inclusion during the European phase of the financial and economic crisis.